A Sustainable Train of Thought

I’ve been working on some definitions for reputation and identity which I hope will help to focus my work and clarify what exactly I’m focusing on. What exactly do I mean by “reputation” and “identity”? Why is reputation valuable? I’m glad you asked.

Premise
The quality of the transactions you engage in with other people builds your reputation.

Therefore:

If your reputation gives you access (discounts, use of objects, etc.),
and
If this access has a corresponding value to you,
Then reputation could be used as currency.
Once reputation is a currency (i.e.: has real value) then various scenarios are possible. Some of these scenarios are outlined in the Applied Dreams presentation.

Reputation
Reputation is your history of behavior as reflected through person-to-person transactions (or potentially person-to-object or person-to-service transactions). These historical transactions build your reputation, with “reputation” itself as the momentary or immediate summation of your history.

The value of reputation lies in helping to mitigate risk in future transactions. The assumption is that if you know what I’ve done in the past, then you may have a better chance at predicting my behavior in the future.

Reputation has a trend component which is just as important as the immediate summation of historical transactions. Specifically, a more recent transaction potentially holds greater weight than older transactions. For example, losing a borrowed book when I was five is less relevant than if I lost a borrowed book yesterday. Making this information available to others may impact your transactions by making it easier to more difficult to gain access, e.g.: your discount increases or decreases, your social circle of willing lenders may expand or contract.

Identity
Your identity is in part a reflection of your reputation, and as such has a component which is constantly in flux. Identity has a grounded component which never changes (your “constant” identity) and a flexible component which reflects your current reputation and its trend. By proxy, then, your reputation trend also becomes part of your flexible identity and is as important as the reputation value (number) itself.

I realize that establishing your “constant” identity is extremely important—one person must have only one constant identity. However, in my thesis I am not interested in pursuing issues of verification and authentication.

In a future post I’ll define “transactions” and “ratings” and clarify some other reputation management system mechanics, but for now I need to hit the sack.

So it looks like Opinity and Rapleaf have joined forces. The announcement of their partnership uses the term “silos of reputation” which I’ve used before to describe the current state of affairs regarding reputation. In other words, your credit rating is not related to your eBay reputation which in turn is not related to your driving record.

I suppose that making this information publicly available and bound to a single identity could be seen as problematic and dangerous, but I also think there any many advantages to be gained from visible histories, particularly when working or dealing with strangers. In the near-term I don’t think these advantages are quite as apparent as in the future, were these systems to become more widespread and frequented.

What kind of advantages am I talking about? Aside from the social benefits, which I’ve discussed in a previous post, and some of the potential advantages described in the Applied Dreams presentation, other include:

• Anyone can be a delivery or courier service (assuming adequate security safeguards). If you’re going to Berlin, and I need to get a package to someone in Berlin, then perhaps I can pay you to deliver that package for me. My past history with package deliveries might make you more or less inclined to use my services.

• Travel partners. Perhaps I’m looking for a companion to travel with around Europe. Aside from agreeable schedules, I could also use some reassurance about your character. Or perhaps I’m looking for a veteran traveller with good knowledge about a particular region.

• Restaurant recommendations. Sure, these already exist in rudimentary form, but there’s really no way to capture information about trends or affinities. Perhaps histories can reveal a particular person with food tastes similar to yours, which might mean that their assessment of a restaurant would closely mirror your own. In effect, histories can create personally meaningful and personally accurate judgements. Obviously this develops into massive complexity, but putting that aside for the moment, there’s no reason that these sorts of affinities need stop with restaurants: movies, hotels, museum exhibitions, books, and video games are all potential markets, to name a few.

• House guests. Briefly described in the presentation, perhaps you have built up such a great reputation as a house guest that any home in the world is potentially available to you. This sort of future integrates existing social networks into reputation management: how far removed from someone can you be to still enjoy these advantages? A friend of a friend of your aunt’s brother? Or can we imagine a world in which literally anyone would be willing to give you a place to stay?

• Intent to rent. Perhaps objects in the future will be intentionally designed to accommodate sharing and renting behavior as part of this system. You’ll buy a car with the idea that it provides an additional source of income at the expense of a few compromises. So the car might have roomier seats and more luggage capacity than its non-intentioned version. You could still rent anything and everything; “intent to rent” design just makes it easier.

These are just some of the potentials that reputation management systems could afford people. I’m working on some additional concepts and implementations as part of my thesis…

Any other ideas?

Some other reputation management systems:

• Opinity
• iKarma

So far all the management systems I’ve seen focus mainly on online transactions. The Rapleaf blog mentions offline transactions, as does this article in SiliconBeat, but I’m not sure how they actually handle them. According to the article you have to go to the website and engage in a rating process which takes place online, complete with emails. Another aspect of the service that comes through from the description is that it’s more about judging transactions and not the use of objects. The example they use is selling and buying U2 tickets. I think that looking at these offerings will help me focus and get more particular with my thesis.

Didier pointed out Rapleaf to me today. It’s a reputation management system which is further detailed in an article on TechCrunch, as the actual service isn’t publicly available online yet.

The basic concept is the same as what we produced for the Applied Dream —trust and reputation built up between individuals—but it seems they are taking a web-based approach to their transaction management system, which is arguably more practical and “today” than a spime-based world (which for obvious reasons doesn’t exist at the moment). Obviously this impacts my thesis topic now, but I think there’s room to maneuver in terms of the actual off-line interactions and how people build and assess reputation.

Businessweek’s article The Top Ten Hybrid Myths contains a point which I’ve made several times before:

The car you drive sends a powerful message about who you are and what you think about the world. Hybrid drivers take pride in letting other drivers—especially those behind the wheel of gas guzzlers—know that getting from point A to point B doesn’t have to lead us to an uncertain environmental and economic future.

The article has several other points: your choice of vehicle can be tied to national security, political partisanship should be a non-issue regarding hybrid car use, and hybrids are only a partial solution, among others.

While none of the points the article raises are particularly new, I find it interesting that Businessweek is choosing to publish this kind of article, considering it’s more of a mainstream news source.

Amazon.com uses reputation in weighting reviews that people submit, giving “higher quality” work greater prominence on the site.

So how do they determine quality and reputation? Good question.

We also look at who authored the content. If the author has a strong reputation (the product of community feedback about the author’s past works), it’s likely his or her new work is of high quality.

Past reviews contribute to the assumed quality of the present work, although I don’t see any mention of time in their calculations.

What is my reputation? Your reputation is based on the Community’s assessment of your activity (e.g. content you have authored) at Amazon.com. Positive votes on your content will improve your reputation.

An additional aspect to their reputation calculation is the concept of Real Name™ attribution. In essence, you make public your real name (based on the name used on your credit card) and this type of honesty positively weights your recommendations. In essence, revealing your true name is seen as a statement that you stand by what you have written.

More interestingly, though:

Sometimes we have very little information about a piece of content because the author is relatively new and/or because there are few votes on the content. This is where Real Name™ attributions come in.

So an additional property of a Real Name™ is that it helps newbies establish a reputation. In essence, it’s a step you can take for free that immediately puts you on good footing for future recommendations and transactions. I suppose that for a newbie it speaks of intentionality and interest in participating, but there is another aspect of fracturing identity within Amazon which I’m not so sure about. I like the idea of a “free” step, but I’m not sure I like how it can potentially penalize people who don’t take that step.

As a methodology for approaching future scenarios, I’ve identified what I’m calling stepping stones and bridges. These methodologies are based on my personal experience and are useful as metaphors for describing my thought processes. I’ve talked about them in my thesis report, and I actually wrote this post before the thesis report process, but I figure it’s good to post this stuff online too.

Bridges: Projecting into the future by building a tenable link between the present and the future situation.

Stepping stones: Using existing circumstances to project a possible future as a guide-post for future development. The connection between present and future is uncertain.

When building bridges, you look around and assess the situation and use that situation in a literal sense. This approach affords you a specific and concrete implementation which is limited by the physical constraints of the real world, in terms of people, objects, technology, infrastructure, etc.

When using stepping stones, you acknowledge the present circumstances and then throw a concept (stone) into the water ahead of you. Based on the relationship between that stone and the shore you’re standing on you can get a sense of the directions it enables and the challenges it poses.

You might guess that I’m a proponent of stepping stones, and I am. I see several benefits. You might have to toss out several stones before finding a direction that works, but the overall cost of doing so is probably less than building a bridge and realizing halfway through that it’s not heading in the right direction. Even if a particular concept doesn’t work, it’s still out there and can serve as a guidepost as you proceed along a different path. And who knows…paths based on stepping stones tend to be crooked (or at least the interesting paths are), so it’s quite possible that a particular concept may become useful further on in your journey.

I’m certainly finding that the previous work and concepts I’ve developed over my thesis year haven’t gone to waste: in some way they are all present in everything else I do. Perhaps it’s cherry-picking, but perhaps it just makes sense. Not everything is going to work, so pick the best parts of everything you’ve done and see what develops.

With my Thesis Report Draft 2.1, I’ve added a couple more sections and many more images compared to the previous version.

Victor sent me a link about Google Payments Seller Reputation a while ago, but with all the craziness at the time I wasn’t able to check it out until now.

Looks like they’re going for the standard five stars approach, along with some qualitative comments about the process. Again, the comments aren’t standardized, and I don’t really understand the point behind star rating systems in general. With the reputation management system Didier and I worked on for the Applied Dream, we went with a thumbs-up or thumbs-down to evaluate a transaction, because in the end you’d either engage in another transaction with that person or you wouldn’t.

I think a yes or no is much easier to decipher than a star rating, particularly because the stars don’t actually equate to anything meaningful. I understand what five stars means and one star, but what differentiates a two from a three from a four? It becomes a matter of subjective opinion, and at that point the common basis for understanding the rating degrades. Simply put, because of my particular value system that I attach to those stars, my two-star rating may mean something completely different from your two-star rating or even your three-star rating.

I’ve spent plenty of time in my youth mowing lawns, and I always found electric lawnmowers rather odd. Partly because of the potential to mow over your extension cord, which didn’t seem too safe to me, and partly because I always had trouble taking them seriously.

To mow a lawn you need a motor, and motors on lawnmowers should be loud and smelly. Electric lawnmowers sounded at most like a swarm of angry bees buzzing about. Lawnmowers should also be heavy and made of metal—I’ve seen what the professionals use (those riding lawnmowers) and they’re never electric or plastic. As far as I could tell, electric lawnmowers were always made of plastic and thus just came across as more toy than tool.

I suppose you could apply similar logic to the perception of electric cars versus gasoline-powered cars. But that’s another story, and I’m writing this post because of an email I received from Amazon.com today, touting “Eco-Friendly Cordless Lawn Care Tools”. Naturally, I was intrigued, if not a little skeptical. The one part which jumped out at me:

As a valued Amazon.com customer interested in the environment, you might be interested in zero-emission electric trimmers and edgers. Best of all, you never have to hassle with oil and gas again.

If that’s not an abuse of the word “zero emissions” then I don’t know what is. Perhaps if you apply the term to the specific point of use, then yes, physically the object isn’t emitting anything. But that electricity powering the tool is coming from somewhere, and emissions were certainly involved in creating the plastics and components of the tools, their assembly, and their transportation and delivery.

Now, I know that small engines like lawnmowers and snowmobiles and so forth are actually pretty bad in terms of emissions, mainly because they’re not as regulated as vehicle engines. So in that sense I can see how it would be better to use electric lawn-care equipment. But something bothers me about the claim of “zero emissions” and I think it’s the cavalier omission of time in that statement.

Maybe I’m just more tuned into this kind of analysis because of my thesis work and general frame of mind, but then again language usage is really important and we really need to be clear on what exactly we’re talking about when we use terms like “zero emissions”.

A silly, simple solution would be to plant trees to cover the amount of lifetime emissions associated with the creation and use of the lawnmower. Better still would be a redesign which systemically eliminates emissions from the production, delivery, use, and disposal phases.